Joint KY-VA park on ‘Grand Canyon of the South’ acquires more land in $700K deal
A state park jointly owned and operated by Kentucky and Virginia has inked a major land purchase that will add 35 acres, expand opportunities for viewing a budding elk herd and secure the entrance to a popular, motorized off-road trail system.
Officials with Breaks Interstate Park signed an agreement Monday to immediately acquire and begin operations at Southern Gap Outdoor Adventure campground and trailhead. The campus boasts a 7,500-square-foot visitor center and event space, five cabins, 33 RV sites and space for primitive tent camping.
It’s one of the largest land purchases Breaks Interstate Park has made in 75 years and will extend its holdings deeper southward into Virginia. The original property straddles the state border, encircling a valley where the Russell Fork carves a 1,000-foot canyon through the Pine Mountain ridgeline near the easternmost tip of Kentucky and Southwestern Virginia.
The gorge, one of only two joint state park ventures in the U.S., is nicknamed the “Grand Canyon of the South,” attracting visitors to enjoy a geological spectacle unique to the Appalachian Mountains.
Breaks Interstate Park is maintained by a commission with equal representation from Kentucky and Virginia, appointed by their respective governors. Although not directly maintained by either state’s state parks system, both agencies are close partners of the interstate compact.
The $700,000 purchase adds a second campus to the Breaks system separated by 18,000 acres of forested land owned by The Nature Conservancy and leased by the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources for public use. That swath of Cumberland Forest land linking the two campuses puts the interstate park at the center of a massive outdoor recreation refuge that hints back to the region’s century-old vision for a central Appalachian national park.
“We’ve never stopped aspiring to the idea of a national park, if not officially, at least in the size, quality and diversity of activities we offer,” Breaks Interstate Park Superintendent Austin Bradley said. “We feel like this is a step in the right direction.”
Southern Gap Outdoor Adventure sits on a reclaimed surface mining site purchased and opened in 2019 by two co-founders of a civil and environmental engineering firm in Grundy, Va. Billie Campbell and Patrick Owens built the adventure center on the entrance to the Coal Canyon off-road trail system, a network of 127 miles of ATV trails owned by the Southwest Virginia Recreational Authority.
Breaks’s central campus, near Elkhorn City, Ky., and Haysi, Va., serves as the trailhead to another SVRA site called Ridgeview Trail. The Southern Gap purchase, which was funded entirely by a grant from the Charlotesville-based Anne and Gene Worrell Foundation, makes Breaks Interstate Park the gateway to more than 200 miles of off-road vehicle trails, a “significant” user group, Bradley said.
Southern Gap was intended to serve as an incubator for outdoor recreation to stimulate the local economy, said Campbell, president and principal engineer at Terra Tech Engineering.
“Nine years ago, we took a leap of faith on a reclaimed mine site,” he said. “Today, that leap has become a legacy.”
Breaks has maintained a long-term agreement with Southern Gap to ferry visitors to and from another natural feature unique to the region — the largest elk herd east of the Mississippi River. The central Appalachian herd of more than 13,000 animals is centered in Kentucky’s coalfield region, but extends southward into Virginia and Tennessee through The Nature Conservancy and U.S. Forest Service protected land.
The park operates paid bus tours to give guests a glimpse of elk in the restoration zone.
“We’ve already had a bunch of synergy built up with that site because of the elk-viewing tours,” Bradley said.
